Tuesday, April 6, 2021

The Wild, Wild Planet (1966)

People are disappearing in Capitol City at a ridiculous rate and this falls into the jurisdiction of Space Command, of course. Apparently Evil Corporation is miniaturizing people for reasons, with the help of creepy bald men and deflatable women, and Dashing Hero must bend the rules to save the day. Yea, none of this makes sense.

The kidnappers are unbelievably conspicuous, the evil plan is completely incomprehensible, the dialog confoundingly terrible, and the finale is predictable and stupid. Know that trope where the hero does one thing and the bad guy’s entire evil layer just blows up? Yea, that.

The story begins with people, we erroneously presume to be main characters, traveling to a space station. At lunch Dashing Hero character is dealing with Headstrong Female character who flirts with Obvious Villain character. Some scenes occur on the space station and some in Capital City, but we are never sure where and people appear to travel back and forth rather quickly. Bad visual storytelling, but the dialog is worse.

But let’s talk about the better points. The film makes heavy use of miniatures, which look like a pretty awesome toy set. The tiny cars match well the full size vehicles the actors drive but the flying vehicles swing wildly from an obvious string while the full sized units are completely stationary. Points for trying, though. Thing is, this story did not need to take place in space. Or the distant future. That is all window dressing. We just need Evil Corporation using advanced technology for whatever the point of this film is. That can be said for many science fiction films, but it is particularly obvious here.

The fatal flaw is how incomprehensible the story is. Bad Guys didn’t need an amazing plan, they just needed to have one that made sense. Filmed in Italian, I’ll forgive the dialog for being at least in part a poor translation and dubbing. But when the overall story arc is a mess, well, AMRU 2.5.

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